Filtering After Shading With Stochastic Texture Filtering

TL;DR

Applying texture filtering after shading using stochastic sampling improves image accuracy and efficiency in rendering, especially with compressed or neural textures, with minimal additional error.

Contribution

This paper introduces a practical method for post-shading stochastic texture filtering, enhancing accuracy and efficiency over traditional pre-shading filtering methods.

Findings

Post-shading filtering yields more accurate imagery than pre-shading filtering.

Stochastic sampling enables efficient high-quality texture filtering.

Minimal additional error is manageable with denoising or moderate sampling.

Abstract

2D texture maps and 3D voxel arrays are widely used to add rich detail to the surfaces and volumes of rendered scenes, and filtered texture lookups are integral to producing high-quality imagery. We show that applying the texture filter after evaluating shading generally gives more accurate imagery than filtering textures before BSDF evaluation, as is current practice. These benefits are not merely theoretical, but are apparent in common cases. We demonstrate that practical and efficient filtering after shading is possible through the use of stochastic sampling of texture filters. Stochastic texture filtering offers additional benefits, including efficient implementation of high-quality texture filters and efficient filtering of textures stored in compressed and sparse data structures, including neural representations. We demonstrate applications in both real-time and offline rendering and show that the additional error from stochastic filtering is minimal. We find that this error is handled well by either spatiotemporal denoising or moderate pixel sampling rates.